No Picture

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse

Source: The Baffler

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille. read more

No Picture

Chomsky: It Is All Working Quite Well for the Rich, Powerful

Source: Truthout

This is a shorter and slightly revised version of an interview with Noam Chomsky which appeared on Sunday, Dec. 8 in the Syriza-aligned paper Avgi in Greece.

C.J. Polychroniou and Anastasia Giamali: Neoliberal ideology claims that the government is a problem, society does not exist and individuals are responsible for their own fate. Yet, big business and the rich rely, as ever, on state intervention to maintain their hold over the economy and to enjoy a bigger slice of the economic pie. Is neoliberalism a myth, merely an ideological construct? read more

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Mandela, the Unapologetic Radical

Source: Color Lines

The warders called us by either our surnames or our Christian names. Each, I felt, was degrading, and I thought we should insist on the honorific ‘Mister.’ I pressed for this for many years, without success. Later, it even became a source of humour as my colleagues would occasionally call me ‘Mr.’ Mandela.
—Nelson Mandela, “Long Walk to Freedom”

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, 18 of them at Robben Island – the notorious island jail that held the principle leadership of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. It was at that jail, with the help of his comrades, that Mandela wrote his story, “Long Walk to Freedom” (published in 1994). In this book, one gets a sense of Mandela as the deeply political figure that he was: a lawyer who fought against apartheid — a lawyer who discovered that the law was the barrier to change and so moved to politics, including terrorist operations against the intransigent apartheid state. read more